In high frequency reconstruction of audio signals, where a highband is extrapolated from a lowband, it is important to have means to control the tonal components of the reconstructed highband to a greater extent than what can be achieved with a coarse envelope adjustment, as commonly used in HFR systems. This is necessary since the tonal components for most audio signals such as voices and most acoustic instruments, usually are stronger in the low frequency regions (i.e. below 4-5 kHz) compared to the high frequency regions. An extreme example is a very pronounced harmonic series in the lowband and more or less pure noise in the high band. One way to approach this is by adding noise adaptively to the reconstructed highband (Adaptive Noise Addition [PCT/SE00/00159]). However, this is sometimes not enough to suppress the tonal character of the lowband, giving the reconstructed highband a repetitive “buzzy” sound character. Furthermore, it can be difficult to achieve the correct temporal characteristics of the noise. Another problem occurs when two harmonic series are mixed, one with high harmonic density (low pitch) and the other with low harmonic density (high pitch). If the high-pitched harmonic series dominates over the other in the lowband but not in the highband, the HFR causes the harmonics of the high-pitched signal to dominate the highband, making the reconstructed highband sound “metallic” compared to the original. None of the above-described scenarios can be controlled using the envelope adjustment commonly used in HFR systems. In some implementations a constant degree of spectral whitening is introduced during the spectral envelope adjustment of the HFR signal. This gives satisfactory results when that particular degree of spectral whitening is desired, but introduces severe artifacts for signal excerpts that do not benefit from that particular degree of spectral whitening.